According to sciencealert.com, one of the keys to a long and healthy life can be a calm brain without much nervous activity. According to a new study that examined the post-mortem tissue of the brain of long-livers and its differences with the brains of people who died aged 60-70 years, excessive brain activity and exposure to stress can cause great harm to the body and even cause premature death.
Active use of brain resources may not always lead to a positive result.
How does stress affect the human brain?
According to Nature magazine, the current trendactive use of the brain to prevent aging can be not always useful, but even harmful at the cellular level. In order to verify this rather unusual statement, researchers from Harvard Medical School analyzed brain tissue donated to the banks of the human brain by people aged 60 and 70 years and long-livers who lived up to 100 years and older.
The study found thatpeople who died before 80 years old had a lower level of protein, which plays an active role in the process of human relaxation than a similar protein from the brain tissue of long-livers. The protein found is capable of suppressing the genes involved in the stimulation of brain activity, which may indicate that people who are in long-term stress are more prone to the occurrence of such dangerous diseases as, for example, Alzheimer's disease than others.
See also: Scientists have found a region of the brain in which Alzheimer's disease originates
A similar experiment conducted on mice,showed that those rodents that lacked rest often stood out against the rest by paroxysmal bursts of unjustified activity, which suggests that brain hyperactivity directly affects the overall well-being of a living creature and can lead to uncontrolled changes in the behavior of animals and people, however, the mechanism by which these side effects appear is not yet known.
Long-term stress and excessive brain activity can lead to uncontrolled changes in the behavior of people and animals.
Bruce Yankner, professor of genetics and neurology atHarvard Medical School, the lead experiment in mice, argues that studying the mechanisms that lead to hyperactivity can help discover new ways to treat neurodegenerative diseases and even aging itself. So, one of the main conclusions of the study was the detection of harmful neuronal activity that occurs with age when under prolonged stress or in a state of hyperactivity, which not only makes the brain less effective, but also harms the physiology of humans and animals, which as a result shortens life expectancy.
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It was found that with age, a personyou have to use a larger number of brain chains compared to young people in order to complete a particular task. The consequences of this phenomenon remain unclear, but it is likely that such activation patterns may indicate less effective brain function in older people.